Togo

He was a small, difficult puppy that Leonhard Seppala twice tried to give away, and who twice came back — once through a glass window. By 1925 he was twelve years old and had been Seppala's lead dog for a decade, over racing distances no other dog on the coast could hold. Seppala's team ran the longest and most dangerous section of the serum relay: out from Nome to meet the serum, then back with it, about 264 miles in all against the other teams' thirty to fifty. The worst of it was Norton Sound, where the sea ice was breaking up in a gale. Togo took them across in the dark, and the floe they had crossed broke free behind them; at one point Seppala threw him across a widening gap on a towline to haul a drifting ice pan back to the shore. The run finished in temperatures near minus thirty with a wind of sixty-five miles an hour. The papers gave the credit to the last team in, and Seppala spent the rest of his life saying that Togo had been the better dog. He was retired to Poland Spring, Maine, and died there in 1929 at sixteen. His mounted body is at the Iditarod headquarters museum in Wasilla; a statue of him stands in Seward Park in New York.

Loved by · Leonhard Seppala

Honours

• 1925Ran about 264 miles of the serum relay, the longest and most dangerous leg
• 1925Crossed the breaking ice of Norton Sound in a gale, in the dark
• 2001Statue raised in Seward Park, New York
• · Mounted and displayed at the Iditarod Trail headquarters museum, Wasilla, Alaska

Their kind

A Chukchi sled dog from north-eastern Siberia, bred to pull light loads over long distances on very little food, and to sleep out in weather that kills.

A life in seasons